Putting Your Phone in This Pouch Supposedly Makes You Untrackable

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Putting Your Phone in This Pouch Supposedly Makes You Untrackable

The easiest way to get some instant privacy in this always-connected world might be to put your phone in this pouch. The Scottevest Blackout Pocket is a Faraday cage disguised as a pencil case, and it's available in three different "strengths."

Assuming it works as advertised, the $30 "Level 2" Blackout Pocket will prevent you from being tracked and constantly distracted by your mobile device. The pouch, which is lined with a RFID-blocking material, supposedly prevents your phone's cellular and GPS antennas from interacting with the outside world. It basically blankets your mobile device in an invisibility cloak.

If your digital paranoia is limited to worrying about someone skimming personal info off your RFID-enabled credit card or electronic passport, cracking its encryption, then stealing your identity and/or spending your money, the $15 Level 1 Blackout Pocket should do the trick. This pouch protects the RFID chips found in many bank cards, key cards, and RFID-equipped passports from being read wirelessly. The Level 2 Blackout Pocket offers both RFID protection and cellular/GPS signal-blocking.

There's also a third level of the Blackout Pocket, but the first rule of the Level 3 Blackout Pocket is that you don't talk about the Level 3 Blackout Pocket. It costs $80, and you're not allowed to buy it unless you've got a job in "law enforcement, government, and specialist organizations," according to the Scottevest site. You're not even allowed to know which kinds of signals it blocks. We should probably stop talking about it now.